Why do all keyboards look the same? Or: How to design a better keyboard from scratch

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Why is a keyboard shaped like a keyboard? Better yet, why are all of the letters of the alphabet, numbers, and some punctuation, arranged in four slightly diagonal rows of keys — and more importantly, why has the layout of the keyboard gone almost unchanged in 100 years? There must be a really good reason, right? Wrong.

Typewriter diagram, showing mechanical linkages

For the most part, keyboards have looked virtually the same because… that’s how they’ve always looked. The first “modern” mechanical keyboards, which started to emerge around 150 years ago, had mechanical linkages between each key and a striker — a rod of metal, with a piece of metal type at the end, that imprinted that key’s letter on the page. To prevent the linkages from getting tangled, they had to be offset slightly so that they each had their own plane to move in. If you look at your keyboard right now, there’s a very good chance that not a single key (from the alphanumeric block) lines up vertically.

It is not a coincidence that newer areas of the keyboard — parts that were invented after the typewriter, such as the function keys and the right-hand numpad — are aligned in a matrix grid. Virtual keyboards, such as on your smartphone or tablet, are also organized in a grid. Incidentally, there are some people who say that a matrix layout is easier to type on and causes less strain on your joints, but sadly there are very few keyboards that offer non-staggered keys. This is what we call path dependence.

Maltron ergonomic keyboard

As for the flat, rectangular shape of most modern keyboards, that’s mostly down to cost, desk space, and uniformity. There are plenty of odd-shaped keyboards out there if you look for them (pictured right), but they cost a lot more to make — and they generally require a lot more desk space, too. Uniformity means that you can easily move from one keyboard to another without having to relearn how to use it (the QWERTY standard helps a lot, too).

A new keyboard from scratch

In short, due to historical precedent and other meatspace constraints, your computer’s keyboard is probably pretty crappy. If you started afresh and set out to make the best keyboard you could possibly make — in terms of typing speed, comfort, and ergonomics — you would end up with something very different indeed. Something that looks like this:

The above keyboard, the one at the top of the story, and the keyboards shown below, were designed by Jesse Vincent, who’s trying to make the perfect keyboard. Once he works out the final design, it sounds like he will use Kickstarter to sell a keyboard under the Keyboard.IO brand. The Kickstarted keyboard will probably look a lot like the keyboard at the top of the story, which Vincent refers to as Mark 13. The heart-shaped keyboard is Mark 5.

Mark 3. Laser-cut plywood, with mechanical keys in a rudimentary ergonomic “split” layout. The thumb keys turned out to be rather uncomfortable… back to the drawing board.

Vincent primarily used laser cutting for the wood and acrylic prototypes, and 3D printing for the plastic prototypes. (Read: What is 3D Printing?) The key switches are mechanical (Cherry MX Blues we assume), and the key caps are just commodity caps that Vincent had access to. Inside each keyboard is a programmable microcontroller that provides a USB interface, so that the DIY keyboards can be plugged into a PC. The early keyboards use a Teensy, while the Mark 13 (and the final Kickstarted keyboard) use an Arduino Micro.

Mark 6. A 3D-printed base (12 hours to print), 3D-printed hand plates (3-4 hours each) with mechanical keys. The design is slightly “tented” (raised in the middle), for improved ergonomics. The gaps between the columns were too wide, resulting in uncomfortable splaying of the hands.

Mark 9. Printed with ABS plastic. Two linked halves joined by a ball joint, to allow for separation and tenting for ergonomics. In practice, the ball joint didn’t work well enough unless it was on a flat, hard surface.

Mark 11. Vincent’s 3D printer caught fire making Mark 10, so he returned to layered acrylic for Mark 11. By this point, he’s starting to finalize the location of the keys and the distance between the keys for max comfort. This design ended up being too heavy, and the inner butterfly shape cut into his wrists.

And so we finally reach Mark 13 (below). As you can see, the butterfly shape remained. Unfortunately, it’s rather hard to tell if the center of the keyboard is raised in the middle (tented), but based on Vincent’s previous designs we assume that’s the case. The lowest buttons, on the palm rests, are actually palm keys — keys that you can activate by pushing down with the fleshy bit at the base of your thumb. You can see the Arduino Micro at the top, beneath a layer of clear acrylic.

Mark 13. Perfect… almost!

So, there you have it. It sounds like Vincent is happy enough with Mark 13 that he will now prepare it for mass production, through a process called design for manufacturability (DFM). So far, every key switch has been hand-wired — the final version, of course, will have to use a printed circuit board (PCB) that needs to be designed. A final, hard-wearing material needs to be chosen for the keyboard’s chassis, too.

Vincent has some hard work ahead to make his butterfly keyboard ready for commercial sale, but we wish him all the luck. The world would definitely be a better place if there were more ergonomic keyboards for sale.

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i would have hoped that the “makey makey” would have been in this article. i mean why wants to type on a keyboard when you can use apples, bananas, citrons to Zucchini Zucchini as your letters.

koshmaar

Cool! I’ve definitely want to try a keyboard like Mark 13. Seeing the difference between normal straight keyboard and my curved MS Natural 4000, I believe having even more separation and ergonomic curves might make it even better.

If also he’d make the keys small LCD screen (like in some russian prototype, Optimus it was called I think) and make the price not more than 100-150, that would be indeed a perfect keyboard. I’ll keep an eye at the Kickstarter.

For me, the more ergonomic one is much more important than being able to reprogram the image that’s on the keys. YMMV.

VirtualMark

I think I’ll just wait for a brain interface.

Strider

How about a speech interface? They are already available.

http://www.axiam-pc.co.uk Darren Forster

Speech interfaces aren’t that good. I’ve tried the one on my android and was really disappointed – it picked up so much background noise and instead of typing what I just said it ended up with a mixture of people’s conversations, it was so hard to use that I just went back and typed it in – I thought I know how to touch-type and can type a lot faster and more accurate than this thing.

They’re a little bit more accurate than about 13 years ago when I first tried with Dragon Dictate, but still nowhere near as accurate as you’d want them to be. Same goes for OCR – I worked for a company once that used OCR and the amount of times OCR got it totally wrong was unbelievable and the OCR technology at that company was supposed to be one of the best available.

VirtualMark

I use mine, and agree with what you’re saying. It works well for basic stuff, but does get a lot of words wrong.

It’s linked to Google search, so if I ask a common term like “where’s the nearest petrol station” it’ll navigate me there, which is pretty cool.

VirtualMark

They are still inaccurate and annoying to use. I dictate to my phone, but it gets the phrases wrong half the time. If there’s any background noise, forget it.

http://ionintel.blogspot.com/ Aerosheet

I don’t want to lose my hands…

Strider

I worked as a temp for a while back in the late 80’s as an “input specialist” on mainframe terminals. I lost count along the way how many different keyboards I used, but it surpassed 30 before I did.

http://www.axiam-pc.co.uk Darren Forster

Keyboards don’t necessarily need to follow the QWERTY standard layout. There are a number of alternatives.

In Germany they have the QWERTZ layout because Y and Z are reversed.
On UK keyboards Shift+3 gives £ where as US keyboards Shift+3 gives #
There is also the DVORAK keyboard which is supposed to be easier to type on.

As for making it easier to switch from system to system this is not that correct – think about a car.

If you get in a car that was made in Korea chances are you’ll notice that the indicator and windscreen wiper stalks are the wrong way around compared to a European car.

Some cars like the Peugeot’s have really high gear sticks in comparison to others like the Nissan’s.

Some cars have their headlight/foglight switches on the indicator stalk (my old Nissan Note was like that), where as others are to the right of the driver (my Zafira A has the headlight/foglights here).

Some cars have 4/5/6 gears.

Some cars have a two-click indicator system that turns off half way around a corner if you didn’t push it up high enough (thanks Vauxhall for that stupid idea – supposed to stop people leaving there indicators on on motorways, quite sure it could have been better designed based on the vehicles speed as to which mode it enters!)

I remember when learning to drive when my driving instructor swapped cars I had to remember the windscreen wipers and indicators were the other way around, and at the time I was working for Safeway – and he said imagine those lorry drivers in there – they have to get out of a car with 5 gears and jump into a lorry in the morning with a lot more gears and a totally different layout – how do you think they cope.

Ok – yes I do think that things like cars should all have the same layout – but it doesn’t take too long for you to master a slightly different layout of things.

Timmehhh

I disagree. Cars a relatively simple to operate, and a flick of the wrong switch is usually rectified with no time lost.

While I understand a truck driver may have a little adjusting to do, I think manual cars with more or less than 5 gears are pretty rare. I’ve certainly never encountered one.

You switch a few letters around on a keyboard and I guarantee you will be retyping every second word, crippling your typing speed and causing immense frustration. Especially if you are a seasoned typist.

99% of typing is done with just letters and few punctuation, and I think simply bending the standard keyboard down the middle would be all the improvement you really needed.

brunnegd

There is also an infrastructure issue to think about. All keyboard trays are set up for rectangular keyboards. And was stated in one other comment, it won’t fit a laptop.

Perhaps a bigger question is: Are more people moving to tablets, without keyboards, such that the market for keyboards will shrink dramatically? The only tablet I am aware of that comes close to the functionality of a desktop or laptop is the Surface Pro, and it is more expensive than either a desktop or laptop.

AMPlifier

How well would the Mark 13 compare to the Maltron keyboard? It seems relatively flat, whereas the Maltron is really curved, but it also splays your hands far apart.

Matthew Kent

Two issues I see with his board, one is due to him using off the shelf components and the other is well… spacebar? I use the spacebar a lot and in several of his examples there is no clearly delineated spacebar. In two it appears to be two standard keys. With those designs you will have to design a custom spacebar. Which goes back to the biggest issue, he is using off the shelf ducky keys (great keys) but they don’t allow him to create a rise or dip in the board, which is something I really like in the ergonomic boards I have used.

Blame the Victim

How about getting off your butt and finally inventing direct neural input so we don’t have to worry about god damned keyboards, huh? HUH???

David Owen Nunes

what about a wireless keyboard, which is in two parts – and attached to the handrests on your chair. Then no straining forward and stuff.

I bought an Ergodex DX1, which is pretty amazing. You have a bunch of individual buttons and you put them onto this flat base, and then program the keys however you want. This allows for unlimited customizability. There are not enough keys to make en entire keyboard though. The BIG ISSUE is that they still have not released drivers for Win7, Win 8.

Felix

Before you plunge into untested territory, review ErgoDox and TrulyErgonomic.

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